TPC-Journal-V2-Issue1

66 College-Student Personal-Growth and Attributions of Cause W. P. Anderson, Jr. Sandra I. Lopez-Baez Little is known about levels of personal growth attributed by students to typical college life experiences. This paper documents two studies of student self-reported and posttraumatic growth and compares growth levels across populations. Both studies measure student attributions of cause to academic and non-academic experiences, respectively. It is suggested that future research on the outcome of college life experiences can use a similar approach with a variety of variables. Keywords : college life, personal growth, posttraumatic growth, life experiences, attributions of cause, outcome of college The Professional Counselor Volume 2, Issue 1 | Pages 66–80 © 2012 NBCC and Affiliates www.nbcc.org http://tpcjournal.nbcc.org doi:10.15241/wpa.2.1.66 The results of a rapidly growing number of studies document high levels of adversarial growth attributed by survivors in retrospect to coping with negative life experiences (Linley & Joseph, 2004) including war, bereavement, or loss of a child. The Posttraumatic Growth Inventory (PTGI) by Tedeschi & Calhoun (1996) has been the most popular measure of adversarial growth to date (Joseph, Linley, & Harris, 2005; Linley & Joseph, 2004; Tedeschi & Calhoun, 2004). In this context, adversarial refers to the negative nature of an experience of interest to researchers. Growth refers to personal growth defined as the positive psychological changes described by assessment-instrument items, changes such as the building of interpersonal relationships, a greater appreciation of the value of life, and a realization of new possibilities in life (examples after Tedeschi & Calhoun, 1996). Thus, adversarial growth is personal growth attributed by participants to a naturalistic negative event of particular interest to researchers. We stumbled on the PTGI and the relationship between adversarial and personal growth while searching for an instrument for measuring personal growth attributed in retrospect to the sum of naturalistic experiences (both positive and negative) occurring during a time period of interest to researchers. The growth of immediate interest to us is not adversarial, but rather the total personal growth of college students because our long-term goal is to determine how educators can best facilitate growth, whether adversarial or otherwise. Developmental theorists (Chickering, 1969; Chickering & Reiser, 1973; Pascarella & Terenzine, 1991; Perry, 1970) have suggested that students grow in response to the combination of typical experiences of college life. Although researchers have used a variety of instruments to measure both academic and personal growth (for recent examples see Hassan, 2008; Higgins, Lauzon, Yew, Brasweth, & Morley, 2009), little is known about how college-student growth compares to adversarial growth because comparisons require measures obtained with the same instrument. Therefore, we want to measure college-student growth with an instrument that has been used to measure adversarial growth. Tedeschi and Calhoun (2004) implied that the PTGI might be suitable for our purposes by characterizing its items as capturing the core of personal growth (without distinguishing between adversarial and personal growth). We decided to use the PTGI after noting that the developers themselves conducted the first study of non-adversarial growth based on the PTGI by using it to measure levels of personal growth described by college students in a small ( n = 32) non-trauma comparison group (see study 3 in Tedeschi & Calhoun, 1996). We conducted the second and third studies of interest ( N = 347, N = 117) by using the PTGI to measure levels of college student personal growth, whether adversarial or otherwise attributed to a single semester of college life (Anderson & Lopez-Baez, 2008, 2011). All three previous studies documented mean levels of student personal growth near the midpoint of the range reported for posttraumatic studies (range 46.00–83.47 for 14 studies summarized by Linley & Joseph, 2004). In our second study, we elicited brief explanations from students to learn how they accounted for their growth (see Anderson & Lopez-Baez, 2011). Explanations were in the form of percentage attributions of total personal W. P. Anderson, Jr., is an Adjunct Professor in the Counselor Education Department and Sandra I. Lopez-Baez, NCC, is an Associate Professor and Chair of Counselor Education Programs, both at the University of Virginia. Correspondence can be addressed to W. P. Anderson, Jr., University of Virginia, Counselor Education Department, Box 400270, Charlottesville, VA 22904, wpa@alumni.virginia.edu .